THE SORROWS OF GENIUS.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3627, 26 February 1883, Page 4

THE SORROWS OF GENIUS.

Homer was a beggar; Plautus turned a mill; Terence was a slave ; Boethius died in gaol; Paul Borghese had fourteen trades, and yet starved with them all; Tasso Avas often distressed for five shillings; Benti-voc-lio Avas refused admittance into an hospital he had himself erected ; the celebrated Avriter of the " Lu-iad " ended his days, it is said, in an almshouse, and at any rate was supported by a faithful black servant, avlio begged in the streets of Lisbon for the only man in Portugal on whom God had bestowed those talents ivhich haA-c a tendency to erect the spirit of a doAvirward age ; Vaugiltfs left his body to the surgeons to pay his debts as far as the money ivould go : Bacon lived a life of meanness and distress ; Sir Walter Raleigh died on the scaffold ; Spenser, tho charming Spenser, died in want: the death of Collins came through neglect, first causing mental derangement; Milton sold his conywright of "Paradise Lost" for fifteen pounds, at three payments, and finished his life in obscurity ; Drvdenlivedin poverty and distress : Otivay died prematurely and through hunger; Lee died in the streets; Steele lived a life of perfect warfare ivithbailiffs ; Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefeld " was sold for a trifle to save him from the grip of the hnv; Fielding lies in the burying place of the English factory at Lisbon without a stone to mark the spot; SaA-age died in prison at Bristol, where he Avas confined for a debt of eight pounds : Butler lived in penury and died poor; Chatterton, the child genius and misfortune, destroyed himself.